Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  Single senior citizens are also uninterested in moving in with family. Although a century ago nearly 70 percent of elderly American widows lived with a child, today—thanks to social security, private pensions, and more widespread prosperity—only 20 percent do. As Kathleen McGarry, a UCLA economist quoted in the New York Times story “They Don’t Want to Live with You, Either,” put it, “When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone. They buy their independence.”7 Older singles still value their relationships with their children; indeed these relationships are often the most important parts of their lives. But they would rather have what gerontologists call “intimacy at a distance” than a bedroom beneath their grandchildren. They want to live close to their family, but not too close; to see them often, just not all the time.

  Nor do elderly singletons show much interest in living with close friends. Golden Girls may well have been entertaining, but by no means did it inspire the widows of the world to share homes. Increasingly, even those single seniors who get involved in romantic relationships prefer “living apart, together”—keeping places of their own so they can avoid the kinds of emotional, financial, and physical entanglements that proved to be so difficult when they lost their last partner.

  This is not to say that close friendships are unimportant for the widowed elderly. On the contrary, being connected to a supportive social network is precisely what most seniors who live alone need to make peace with their condition, or even to enjoy it. And this is where men’s and women’s experiences of aging alone differ most sharply, especially after the loss of a spouse. On average, women are considerably more skilled at building and sustaining relationships. Women are far more likely than men to age alone, mostly because they usually outlive their spouses. But older women are also far less likely to grow estranged from their friends, family, and neighbors and to become socially isolated. Carr, the sociologist, was surprised to discover that although (as we have seen) in general men are more interested in dating and remarrying than women, those who have high levels of friendship support express the same relatively low desire to remarry as their female peers. “Friendships,” she concludes, “may provide at least some of the same rewards as marriage for older adults.”8 The Harvard epidemiologist Lisa Berkman has confirmed this through studies showing that, for example, singletons who have strong social ties outside the family have fewer health risks than those who are married but otherwise disconnected, and that women who live alone are actually less likely to experience mental health problems and diminished vitality than their married peers.9 This is precisely what we learned from seniors in my interviews, too.

  Ava, a retired bookkeeper, lives by herself in a one-bedroom apartment where the walls and tabletops are adorned with photographs of her five grandchildren, but she does everything possible to spend time away from home. She’s in her late seventies, and remarkably fit and energetic. Ava is the remaining survivor of five siblings, most of whom died young, including a twin brother. “God has kept me around for a reason,” she says. But she also attributes her vitality to her naturally occurring retirement community, which developed as she and her neighbors aged in place while living in their sprawling publicly subsidized housing cooperative near Coney Island. Ava moved into one of the complex’s 2,585 units more than a quarter century ago, after her fifty-two-year-old husband died of a heart attack and her two children had settled into places of their own. She was living on Long Island at the time, and suddenly she no longer needed the space she had there. When her sister-in-law told her she could get a subsidized rental unit, she decided to make a change. “I had to watch my money,” she recalls. “I really didn’t know many people here. Just one woman through someone I knew from the Rockaways, and when she found out I played mahjongg, she came and rang my bell. We’re still friends today.”

  Ava kept her job with a construction company on Long Island when she first moved to the complex. She recognized that her neighbors, along with the building’s staff, were organizing more and more social activities as they aged, but she was too busy to participate and, as a self-identified working woman, not all that interested, either. When she retired, though, her friends from mahjongg persuaded her to come to their senior group, and it quickly became a gateway for other activities: walking the boardwalk and the neighborhood; taking exercise and yoga classes; attending meetings of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization; and volunteering through a program that helps frail and isolated old people nearby. “You have to be involved,” she explains. “Otherwise, what do you do with yourself? You need something to look forward to when you get up in the morning. It keeps you going.”

  Spending time with her girlfriends has always been an important part of Ava’s life, and after a decade in her senior groups she has “at least five really close friends I can confide in” at the complex, plus many casual acquaintances from her classes and activities. In recent years, though, her most absorbing relationship has been her romance with Victor, a widower of twenty-five years who has lived in the housing complex since it opened in 1964. The two had been acquaintances before they started dating, when neither was available. For years, Ava had been in a relationship with Jason, who had been trying to persuade her to marry him, yet she broke things off when his health began to fail—not to be heartless, but because she didn’t want to become his caretaker as things spiraled downward.

  For many of us, this decision may seem surprising, since there’s a myth that older women who live alone are constantly searching for a new husband. But in fact Ava’s choice not to marry Jason is quite typical, because women in her situation know how quickly their lives can come apart once a husband gets seriously ill. Victor, who’s in his early eighties, had a similar experience with his ex-girlfriend, Susan. “I used to kid her about getting married and she said she wouldn’t do it,” he says. “Her husband had had Alzheimer’s, and she’d had enough trouble taking care of him for ten years. ‘I’m not looking after anyone anymore,’ she’d tell me. And I said, ‘No problem.’ We lived two blocks away, so we didn’t need it.”

  The winter after Susan died, Ava saw Victor at a local restaurant and asked him if he was seeing the same woman. “He said, ‘No, she passed away in July,’ and I told him that I was available,” she recalls. “Lo and behold, two days later we saw each other at a Jewish group meeting and he says, ‘What did you mean, you’re available?’ So I’m thinking maybe he took it the wrong way, and I said, ‘Not what you think!’ I said I was just available for dating, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ That was it. That night he called me again and we started going out.”

  The couple wasted little time with courtship. They quickly started spending their weekends together, taking the subway into Manhattan to see plays and movies. By summer, Victor was bringing Ava to Lincoln Center for outdoor concerts and dancing. “We went this past Saturday in horrible one-hundred-degree weather,” she reports. “I just sat under a tree while Victor danced. I have asthma, so I’m not taking any chances.” They helped to organize a talent show at the local senior center, and their joint performance of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” earned an award. Recently they’ve started cooking for each other, once a week at her place, once a week at his.

  But Victor and Ava keep strict limits on their relationship. “I see her Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday,” Victor explains. “The rest is my time.” Ava is similarly protective. On an average day she goes to two morning classes with other women in the complex, then goes home for lunch—“I can’t eat out like some of the women here. I don’t have a pension,” she says. She spends the afternoon walking, volunteering, shopping, or going to the doctor, and in the evening plays mahjongg, talks on the telephone, reads, or watches TV. Occasionally, Ava thinks about what it would be like to live with Victor. She gets lonely some evenings and regrets that she lacks the intimate companionship of a husband. But then she remembers what happened with Jason and thinks about the od
ds that she’d wind up the full-time caretaker of any man who’d be interested in moving in with her. She considers how busy she is already and recognizes that, like so many of her female contemporaries, she’s more interested in having someone to go out with than in having someone to come home to.10 Inevitably, she concludes she’s better off going solo. “Also,” Ava jokes, scanning her tidy apartment, “I really don’t have much room here for a man. I mean, I have no closet space! Where am I going to put him?”

  BOTH AVA AND VICTOR ARE HEALTHY and financially secure, having so much success aging on their own that they’ve never had to contemplate moving in with, or even closer to, their children. In fact, recently Ava has cut down on her visits to her children: a daughter on Long Island with three teenagers, and a son with two young children who took a job with the Defense Department and moved to Virginia. Spending time with them is just not as rewarding as it used to be. “My son is very busy,” Ava explains. “And I try to see my daughter, but her three boys are all big now. Also, she gives me a lot of aggravation. She’s unhappy with her marriage—I think she’s going to leave him. That’s all she talks about.”

  Ava’s not lost any love for her daughter, but these days being with her can be a hardship, and at this point in her life she has little energy to attend to her family’s needs. This is quite common. Elderly singletons often report that one reason they prefer living alone to living with family is that their children do not merely host them, they put them to work—with child care, help with the cooking, even cleaning. Some of these activities are pleasurable for seniors, of course, but most prefer to do them on their own terms, not to meet their children’s demands or expectations. There is also the problem of getting caught up in family dramas, which, again, can make an older person feel integrated or alienated, depending on the situation. For her part, Ava says she’s thankful she doesn’t have to deal with any of this on a daily basis. She believes things will eventually get better for her daughter’s family, but Ava is not embarrassed to say that, at this point, having her own friends, her own home, and her own life is exactly what she wants.

  Other seniors we interviewed harbor more negative feelings about the prospect of living with or moving closer to their children. Joan, an eighty-year-old retired psychologist, divorced her husband decades ago and has been on her own for four years now, ever since her boyfriend died. She enjoys being in the city, likes walking around her neighborhood with a shopping cart, traveling to the bank or the doctor on foot. But recently she needed help when the elevators in her apartment building broke and she couldn’t get up and down the stairs. She was also grateful when her family brought her down south for a six-week visit; she got angry, however, when her daughter and son-in-law insisted that she look for an apartment in the area. “I don’t want to live with them,” she declares. “I love my daughter. I know she loves me. But I don’t wanna be that close to the kids. I don’t trust ’em.” Joan has similar feelings about her son’s family. “For the first time, we are not connected in any way, shape, or form. My son’s very depressed. He plays video poker all the time, talks to nobody. He and his wife have two girls, eleven and seventeen years old. And their eleven-year-old is cute, sweet—but manipulative, incredibly manipulative. Not to be trusted an inch. I stay out of their way for the most part.”

  As Joan sees it, her daughter’s attempts to move her from New York City to the South are motivated by her needs, not Joan’s. “She’ll go, ‘If you were down here, I’d feel so much better about you. You could come over to the house a couple times a week for dinner. Ralph [her son-in-law] could do your shopping for you, and we could take you out once a week.’ But I don’t get along with either of them that well. They both drive me kinda crazy.” Like many other old people, as she’s aged Joan has become less concerned about what other people think she should do and more interested in doing what she wants, even if that means paring down the time she spends with certain friends and relatives, the ones whose companionship she never really enjoyed.11

  Joan believes the real issue facing her children is control. Will her daughter have to live with the anxiety of knowing that her elderly parent lives alone with no family nearby? Or will Joan have to surrender her autonomy, leave her home and her city, to strengthen family ties that she’d rather keep loose? In the end there’s no contest. “I love it here,” Joan exclaims. “I can do what I want, when I went, and how I want. I’m responsible for myself. I’ve made all my arrangements. I’ve made my will, even picked where to be cremated. I suppose as I get weaker I’ll have to be moved somewhere. But I hope I die in New York. I really do.”

  Dee, a petite, light-skinned ninety-year-old African American who has lived alone in a well-maintained one-bedroom apartment in Harlem since her husband died in 1983, also prizes her domestic autonomy and worries about the other options. “This is my house,” she explains. “I’m in charge. I can do whatever I want to do. The idea of a nursing home and—what is that other thing?—assisted living. I dread the thought of it. I want to stay on my own at home.”

  Dee acknowledges that some of her peers would get lonely and isolated if they were in her situation, but she also thinks that many people—social workers, relatives, friends—overestimate her needs for companionship at this stage in life. “People think you should have company all of the time,” she complains. “I don’t mind my own company. I do things when I’m ready to do them.” Decades ago, Dee was a community activist, on the board of her housing association, involved in fights over integration, engaged in organizations like the NAACP. Now most of her friends have died or moved to warmer climates, and she has discovered that she’s content if she sees those who remain in New York City every few weeks or so, for lunch dates or trips to a museum. Most days, Dee spends her time reading—biographies, novels, and magazines, mostly. (She says she stopped reading the newspaper regularly because she realized that, at ninety, she has only so much time left for learning and she wants to focus on “serious things” with enduring value, not on the random events of the moment.) She talks on the phone regularly, watches a little television in the evenings, and goes out into the city as much as her body allows her, about three or four times a week. “I try to live with my limitations,” Dee tells me. “I’m just happy doing what I do.”

  Not everyone has the emotional capacity to be alone in this manner. But Dee has been on her own for nearly three decades, and she’s fortunate enough to have the skills and disposition that help singletons flourish. Her only child, a daughter who lives alone in Massachusetts, respects her commitment to solitude. Dee says the two are “extremely close,” and yet the idea of moving closer is unappealing. “I don’t want to live with my daughter,” she explains. “We have different approaches to things. When I visit her, of course I’m congenial. I do things the way she wants them done, and she tries when she’s here. But she’s beginning to supervise me.” Like Joan, Dee gets upset when her daughter tries to mother her. It’s demeaning, she says, but also threatening. Dee prides herself on being independent, and when someone suggests that she needs special assistance, it makes her feel she’s losing control.

  FEAR OF LOSING one’s independence haunts most of those who grow old in contemporary societies, as does anxiety about becoming dependent on other people or institutions. These are among the deepest insecurities generated by the cult of the individual. For when our dignity and integrity require the self-perception of personal autonomy, we experience profound humiliation—a loss of face—if we are forced to acknowledge that we can no longer make it on our own.

  At some level, of course, none of us is truly independent. Collective belief in the myth of autonomy obscures the fact that our prized individualism is directly underwritten by social institutions: the family, the market, the state.12 Related fantasies—of self-reliance, or the self-made man, for instance—lead us to ignore the webs of interdependency that give even the most antisocial among us the strength to go it alone. Yet there is a clear di
stinction between people like Dee, Victor, and Ava, who can care for themselves and maintain a high quality of life while in their own apartments, and their many less fortunate contemporaries, who suffer immensely from living alone but do not have any relatives who could help them or who fear that moving in with others—and thereby admitting their need for special assistance—would be even worse. Elena Portacolone, a young medical sociologist who assisted me on this research, calls this predicament the “tyranny of independence.” And the stories of less healthy elderly singletons illustrate why.

  Take Edith, a self-defined “shut-in” in her late seventies, who has spent thirty years dealing with the physical repercussions of strong radiation treatments that her doctors used to combat her aggressive ovarian cancer. She was a teacher specializing in the education of deaf children when she was diagnosed and first treated, and she says that no one understood the consequences of heavy radiation exposure until years after her treatment ended. “They got the cancer,” Edith explains. “But it was a mixed blessing. They burned me until most of my insides were gone. I had to retire at fifty-two, and I’ve been disabled ever since.”

  Edith complains about the poor quality of her life now. She lives off disability insurance and she’s constantly stressed about her finances. She endures nearly constant physical pain, struggles with depression, and is losing her teeth from malnutrition. She has trouble moving and rarely leaves her home. She is lonely, and yet reluctant to acknowledge her emotional hardships to her few remaining friends, lest they abandon her. And on the one recent occasion when she agreed to have a volunteer from an outreach program visit her home and take her outdoors in her wheelchair, she wound up tripping over him and getting hospitalized with a compound fracture in her arm. Now she has nurses and social workers coming to assist her, and they’re urging her to move into an institutional facility. “I’m angry at everybody at this point,” Edith confesses. “I’m just stuck.”